Engineering – MIT Libraries Newshttps://libraries.mit.edu/news
News & updates from the libraries at MITTue, 18 Dec 2018 18:55:54 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=5.0.1Encyclopedia of Sustainable Technologies arriveshttp://libraries.mit.edu/news/?p=28552
Tue, 11 Dec 2018 13:47:29 +0000http://libraries.mit.edu/news/?p=28552The MIT Libraries is pleased to announce online access to the Encyclopedia of Sustainable Technologies, “the first multi-volume reference work to employ both Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) and Triple Bottom Line (TBL) approaches to assessing the wide range of technologies available and their impact upon the world.”

Its five sections tackle topics in system analysis and sustainability in the built environment, manufacturing, chemical processes, water, energy systems, and more. Each article is written by an expert in the field and includes references for further investigation. We hope this is will be a helpful additional source to support the sustainability work on campus!

]]>Learn with the Libraries: Summer 2018http://libraries.mit.edu/news/?p=27771
Wed, 18 Jul 2018 19:00:48 +0000http://libraries.mit.edu/news/?p=27771School may be out for the summer, but you can still Learn with the Libraries! We are offering several workshops on topics ranging from citation management to maps and data management. Click on a workshop for more information and to register.

Nancy Hopkins with Salvador Luria and David Baltimore at the MIT Cancer Center. Courtesy MIT Museum.

A new MIT Libraries initiative aims to highlight MIT’s women faculty by acquiring, preserving, and making accessible their personal archives. The Institute Archives and Special Collections (IASC) launched the project last year with the generous support of Barbara Ostrom ’78 and Shirley Sontheimer. The first year of the project has focused on reaching out to faculty who are ending the active phase of their careers. Four faculty members added their personal collections, comprising 234 boxes and 50 GB of material. They are:

Nancy Hopkins
Amgen Inc. Professor of Biology Emerita, known for making zebrafish a widely used research tool and for bringing about an investigation that resulted in the landmark 1999 report on the status of women at MIT

Mary Potter
Professor Emerita in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, chair of the MIT faculty, and member of the Committee of Women Faculty in the School of Science; her research and teaching focused on experimental methods to study human cognition

Mary Rowe
Adjunct professor at Sloan School of Management, special assistant to the president, and ombudsperson, a conflict resolution specialist whose work led to MIT having one of the nation’s first anti-harassment policies

Sheila Widnall ’60, SM ’61, ScD ’64
Institute Professor and Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the first woman to serve as secretary of the Air Force and the first woman to lead an entire branch of the U.S. military

A donation of the papers of Mildred Dresselhaus, late Institute Professor Emerita of Physics and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, is also forthcoming. Dresselhaus, whose work paved the way for much of today’s carbon-based nanotechnology, was also known for promoting opportunities for women in science and engineering. Discussions with additional faculty are also underway.

“We are honored to be stewards of these personal archives that have been given to MIT,” says Liz Andrews, project archivist. “We’re committed to preserving and making accessible these unique materials so they can be shared with the world into the future.”

Acquisitions of MIT administrative records provide additional context to the personal archives and a broader view on issues of gender equity and the challenges faced by women in academia. The next phase of the project will continue to manage donations, prepare collections for use, and enlarge this core group by reaching out to women faculty who were tenured in the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s.

Ultimately, the collections will provide not only rich resources for researchers, journalists, teachers, and students, but also, as Sontheimer says, inspiration for generations of women to come: “I’m hoping the project will encourage more women to become engaged in science, technology, and engineering.”

As a scientist interested in developing sustainable methods to create materials, Elsa Olivetti wanted to data mine decades of scholarly articles to provide researchers what she calls “a toolkit of how materials have been made, to learn how we can improve how they are made or make new materials.”

Olivetti, MIT’s Atlantic Richfield Assistant Professor of Energy Studies, and her collaborators built an artificial intelligence natural language processing system that could extract just the information on materials creation that they needed from the literature, capable of scanning far more articles than a human could. The catch? Many of the journals they were interested in were not available for data mining. This is when Olivetti started working with Ellen Finnie, head of Scholarly Communication and Collections Strategy for MIT Libraries.

“MIT researchers have been interested in text and data mining for decades,” Finnie said. “But academic journals and major newspapers are often behind paywalls or available only in formats that prohibit large-scale analysis.”

The Libraries purchase access to journals and other materials for MIT through license agreements, and Finnie and her colleagues have been negotiating for text and data mining rights in these licenses. “It is still such a new approach for publishers to allow this kind of access that the Libraries are working on standard language for text mining in the legal agreements with publishers,” she said.

To support Olivetti’s research, Finnie and her team, including Scholarly Communications and Licensing Librarian Katie Zimmerman, worked with each publisher individually to gain access to a wide swath of research in materials science. As a result, Olivetti and her colleagues have been able to analyze more than 1.5 million articles. To date they have published three papers on this work in the journals Chemistry of Materials, npj Computational Materials, and Scientific Data.

Providing researchers with access to minable texts and data is a growing need, Finnie said. While her team does much of the work on licensing, other library staff take the actual data—which often arrives from a publisher in a large text file with no sortable markers—and put it into a format that will allow researchers to assess what is there and decide how to approach it. The barrier that Olivetti faced is one reason the Libraries are working to advance models for scholarly journal publication to become more open. “There are lots of different ways to move the environment towards more access and openness,” Finnie said.“And one way is to expand what is allowed through the license.”

Without the Libraries doing the licensing work, “the logistics would have been daunting,” Olivetti said. “Ellen and her team have been able to facilitate interactions with the publishers and move things along. If I had had to do all that on my own, I wouldn’t have started the project.”

The Barker Engineering Library – as part of the Institute’s investment in infrastructure renewal – will once again be impacted by the project to replace windows and renew façades as crews begin work on the west side of Building 10, facing the President’s Courtyard.

Construction activities for this work are scheduled to begin on Saturday, June 9, and will continue through November 2018. Window removal construction hours are 10pm– 6am nightly, beginning June 9. Masonry demolition and repair is scheduled to commence on Monday, June 11, with anticipated hours of 6am-3pm daily.

Barker will remain open throughout the duration of the project, but users of the space should expect noise and vibration throughout the library.

Nine topical volumes, with contributions from more than 150 experts, cover key subjects such as past remote sensing missions and instrumentation; data processing; and sensing over terrestrial ecosystems, the atmosphere, and oceans. The work concludes with the chapter, “Applications for Societal Benefit.” Examples of specific topics include mapping peatlands, measuring sea surface albedo, remote sensing for leaf area index and vegetation, surveys on water in lakes, ozone soundings, and seismic oceanography, just to name a few.

Comprehensive Remote Sensing will provide both background and current discussion of these important efforts and findings. We’re grateful to MIT Lincoln Laboratory Research Library for this timely new subscription that includes our campus and hope that many will explore its riches.

The MIT Libraries are pleased to announce access to SNL Energy, a product of S&P Global, and a comprehensive resource for data on U.S. and Canadian power plants, energy companies, coal mines, and gas pipelines. Use it to find detailed financials, filings, supply and demand fundamentals, emissions data, hourly market pricing, electricity rates, and more. Consult the daily, weekly, and monthly newsletters to stay current on various segments of the energy industry.

To begin, register for an account and download the Excel add-in needed to pull data from SNL Energy. It is available under Apps on the SNL website. Open Excel and use the DataWizard embedded in the Excel Add-In to access years of historical data about companies, assets, and markets.

With so much interest on campus in power plant costs, energy prices, and more, we hope you will explore this new resource, and Tell Us what you discover! Questions? Contact Shikha Sharma, librarian for business and management.

Watch a video portrait of Chris Sherratt, librarian for atmospheric and oceanic sciences, energy and environment, and nuclear science and engineering, by the MIT School of Engineering. Sherratt talks about following MIT researchers’ work in depth, the Libraries’ commitment to open access, and stopping at nothing to track down the resources the community needs.

]]>More papers online from the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE)http://libraries.mit.edu/news/?p=25459
Wed, 19 Jul 2017 15:19:43 +0000http://libraries.mit.edu/news/?p=25459The MIT Libraries are very pleased to announce expanded online access to a key resource in transportation: the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) Technical Papers. SAE Mobilius now provides full text of these papers from 1906 to the present. Current SAE Aerospace Standards are also included.

For any items you can’t access full text in Mobilus (e.g., other SAE standards, publications from the Society of Automotive Engineers of Japan (JSAE), or other publishers’ papers), please use Ask Us.

This session will enable you to successfully find patent references from all over the world and obtain patent text and diagrams. This hands-on session will help de-mystify the patent literature and show key resources for finding patents.

This session will introduce engineers and scientists to business information resources that will help you understand the commercial potential for your ideas, how to find partners, and sources for financial support. We will use realistic examples and hands-on exercises with key resources to demonstrate how to match your ideas and discoveries with the opportunities and realities of the marketplace.

Who says blogs don’t have a place at the information table? This month the MIT Libraries began a subscription to ACI Scholarly Blog Index, a new resource designed to help you discover and navigate scholarly blogs from a wide variety of disciplines. Begun in 2004 as Newstex, staff at Authoritative Content Index (ACI) are now led by CEO and MIT alumnus Steve Ellis. Their mission is to monitor and help readers discover reliable content from 10,000 news and commentary blogs: In their words, to enable you to do “research at the speed of now.”

Prominent on the site are links to several videos explaining how to find relevant blogs, tailor your searches, and store and share your results. Give ACI a try soon to find up-to-date social media conversations relevant to your work. There could be blogs you need to follow!

]]>Business Information for Engineers and Scientistshttp://libraries.mit.edu/news/?p=24638
Mon, 20 Mar 2017 14:41:11 +0000http://libraries.mit.edu/news/?p=24638This session will introduce engineers and scientists to business information resources that will help you understand the commercial potential for your ideas, how to find partners, and sources for financial support. We will use realistic examples and hands-on exercises with key resources to demonstrate how to match your ideas and discoveries with the opportunities and realities of the marketplace.

]]>OA research in the news: Volkswagen emissions may increase mortality rates in Europehttp://libraries.mit.edu/news/?p=24594
Thu, 16 Mar 2017 13:00:45 +0000http://libraries.mit.edu/news/?p=24594In 2015, Volkswagen admitted to doctoring software in its diesel cars so they would pass emissions tests. The company had sold 11 million of the defective cars, which released more than four times the amount of air pollutants permitted under European law.

A recent study, coauthored by MIT researchers including Professor Steven Barrett, estimates that 1,200 people in Europe will die prematurely because of excess emissions from the 2.6 million cars sold in Germany alone.

“A natural next step for us is to focus on excess emissions by all manufacturers,” the study’s lead author, MIT AeroAstro graduate student Guillame Chossière told the New York Times. “Europe has very severe air quality issues, and enforcing standards in diesel cars should be considered as a first step toward cleaner air.”

Since the MIT faculty established their Open Access Policy in March 2009 they have made thousands of research papers freely available to the world via DSpace@MIT. To highlight that research, we’re offering a series of posts that link news stories about scholars’ work to their open access papers in DSpace.

MIT Libraries have added several databases in agriculture, food, and water recently: CAB Abstracts and Water Intelligence Online are examples. And while our newest product comes from a more humble beginning than these larger ones, it makes discovery and access to a key journal and its close relatives much easier.

The Transactions of the American Society of Agricultural Engineering (ASAE) used to arrive in print only in Barker Library. Now, thanks to a new subscription to the Technical Library of the ASABE, (the B adds in biological engineering) papers in this journal and several others will be online at our fingertips. MIT will have access to ASABE conference papers, standards and books on topics including agricultural technologies, crops, soils, and more. And, since many people find these papers searching the engineering database Compendex, they should be able to connect to full text right there.

This month’s Transactions has papers on smart phone apps for irrigation, flood modeling of the Yellow River, and turfgrass evapotranspiration: something for everyone! The very first paper (1958) is “Applying Digital Computers to Farm Tractor Design.” And the most recent? “Cotton, tomato, corn and onion production with subsurface drip irrigation: a review.”

We hope you have a reason to harvest ASABE information soon! Any questions, just Ask Us.

]]>authors@MIT: Matthew Claudelhttp://libraries.mit.edu/news/?p=22795
Mon, 19 Sep 2016 12:00:02 +0000http://libraries.mit.edu/news/?p=22795Please join us as we celebrate the publication of The City of Tomorrow (Yale University Press), an exciting new book from Carlo Ratti and Matthew Claudel which explores the implications of their innovative work at MIT’s Senseable City Lab and the radical changes that pervasive digital technology may bring to future urban life.

Wednesday, October 12, 2016
5 pm
Room 56-154

Refreshments will be served.

Sponsored by the MIT Press Bookstore and the MIT Libraries.

]]>A very old map made newhttp://libraries.mit.edu/news/?p=22710
Mon, 12 Sep 2016 13:00:24 +0000http://libraries.mit.edu/news/?p=22710Some in the MIT community will know that just over 200 years ago, the first geological map of the United Kingdom was created by the son of a blacksmith, William Smith. But did you know that in honor of this fine achievement, the Geological Society of London has issued a map ‘done in the style of William Smith’s’, but showing the current rock record?

The Geological Map of Britain: Bicentennial 1815-2015, whose proper title is A delineation of the strata of Scotland, England, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Isle of Man: exhibiting the distribution of the different bedrock units as they would appear if the partial cover of superficial sediments, deposited by glaciers and rivers during the last two million years or so, were removed has joined the cataloged map collection located in the Hayden Library Basement. The map shows the geology with its usual symbols, lines, and legend in the wonderful style of hand-colored pastels Smith used. We also have the reproduction of the original 1815 map.

The story of Smith and his map was told in bestselling book The Map that Changed the Worldby Simon Winchester. Through it we journey with Smith through the 18th and 19th century, looking at what lies below us as well as what surrounds us. Smith and his mapping of outcrops, marshes, and geology also come to life through poetry: Map: Poems After William Smith’s Geological Map of 1815, published in 2015 and edited by Michael McKimm, collects poems written by geologists to honor the man and his momentous work.

Whether by map, book, or poem, the eyes and steps of this “Father of English Geology” are available to us through the MIT Libraries. Contact Michael Noga, EAPS librarian, for more information, and enjoy!

]]>Engineering librarians convene and celebratehttp://libraries.mit.edu/news/?p=22713
Fri, 19 Aug 2016 17:57:13 +0000http://libraries.mit.edu/news/?p=22713Much of the world knows the strength of the MIT Libraries engineering resources, but did you know the librarians who work with our engineers meet annually to sharpen their tools and tactics?

This summer Angie Locknar and Phoebe Ayers, librarians for Course 2 and 3 and Course 6, respectively, gathered under New Orleans’ blazing sun to hammer out, as they do each year, the best ways to serve the information needs of engineers in this digital age. This year they’ve returned with a heads-up that 2017 will mark the 50th anniversary of their Engineering Libraries Division and the 75th anniversary of the first organized engineering librarians group in the American Society for Engineering Education.

This year’s gathering also highlighted the long roots engineers have in their history of sharing information. And while their earliest publications snaked their way through paper and pen and the postal service of the day, now gems like Engineering News Record (ENR) (1874), Mechanics’ Magazine (London, 1823), and the 1836+ transactions of the world’s first professional engineering organization, the Institution of Civil Engineers (1818) are at our fingertips. These links lead to the digital library of HathiTrust, but these publications are also found right here in the MIT Libraries. They are part of our heritage, too.

Michael White, associate librarian at Queens University, whose open access article “The History of the Engineering Libraries Division,” supplied information used in this post, we thank you!

Engineers and librarians, for your publications and cooperation, we salute you!

Several MIT researchers had a hand in boosting the “geek cred” of characters in this summer’s Ghostbustersreboot. Physics faculty members Janet Conrad and Lindley Winslow, along with former postdoc James Maxwell, lent expertise and props to the set — including actual books, posters, and models from Conrad’s office and “a mess of wires and magnets and lasers” from Maxwell’s lab. Winslow, who told MIT News she “probably put in too much time” working on the film, wrote a series of physics equations that appear in a classroom scene with Kristin Wiig’s character.

“They wanted it to be authentic,” Winslow told Wired magazine, “right up to the point when the ghosts show up.”

Since the MIT faculty established their Open Access Policy in March 2009 they have made thousands of research papers freely available to the world via DSpace@MIT. To highlight that research, we’re offering a series of posts that link news stories about scholars’ work to their open access papers in DSpace.

]]>Even more IET eBookshttp://libraries.mit.edu/news/?p=22570
Tue, 28 Jun 2016 20:00:44 +0000http://libraries.mit.edu/news/?p=22570It’s always newsworthy when 37 years of a publisher’s books become available online to MIT, especially if the content is central to much of our research and teaching.

The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) publishes books on topics critical to MIT’s research and teaching. Thanks to support from Lincoln Labs, MIT and Lincoln now have access to IET eBooks from 2016 on topics ranging from nano-scaled semiconductors to mechatronic hands. The addition of the 2016 titles means MIT now has online access to 37 years of IET books, from 1979 to 2016.

Formed by the March 2006 merger of the UK-based Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE) and Institution of Incorporated Engineers (IIE), the scope of IET covers many fields related to electrical engineering: antennas, circuits, energy, radar, radio, robotics, sensors, signal processing, and transport reflect only some of vast sci/tech and engineering content included in the ebook archive. If you’re already familiar with the IET journals and conference proceedings, you’ll know these are available at MIT through the IEEE Xplore Digital Library. The IET eBooks are available via the IET Digital Library platform.

]]>Use ENGnetBASE material in MITx courseshttp://libraries.mit.edu/news/?p=22491
Tue, 21 Jun 2016 12:00:27 +0000http://libraries.mit.edu/news/?p=22491The MIT Libraries have signed a contract with Taylor & Francis that allows for use of material from the CRC ENGnetBASE engineering e-book collection in MITx courses without need for permission.

The agreement allows for use of “reasonable portions” of figures, tables, images, illustrations, and other information in MITx courses for educational, scientific, or research purposes — for example in explanation, example, comment, criticism, teaching, research, or analysis.

For questions about using the ENGnetBASE material in an MITx course: Contact the ODL Intellectual Property Team or Lindsey Weeramuni, ODL Intellectual Property Manager, at 617-253-2738.

For questions about library contracts and their relationship to use of licensed material in MITx courses: Contact Ellen Finnie, head, Scholarly Communications & Collections Strategy, or email the Libraries’ copyright team.

Studies show that engineering is the most gender-segregated of all science and technology fields, from college classes to the workplace. Explanations for this tend to focus on a lack of women mentors and career demands that are in conflict with family life.

MIT sociologist and anthropologist Susan Silbey and colleagues offer some additional explanations in a recently published study: Women engineering students can feel marginalized because of “everyday sexism” encountered during internships or team-based educational activities. In turn, women “develop less confidence that they will ‘fit’ into the culture of engineering,” the researchers write in their paper.

The researchers asked more than 40 undergraduate engineering students from four schools (including MIT) to keep monthly diaries over four years of study, and they and also conducted interviews.

Since the MIT faculty established their Open Access Policy in March 2009 they have made thousands of research papers freely available to the world via DSpace@MIT. To highlight that research, we’re offering a series of posts that link news stories about scholars’ work to their open access papers in DSpace.

]]>Can Computers be Feminist? Procedural Politics and Computational Creativityhttp://libraries.mit.edu/news/?p=22307
Thu, 26 May 2016 13:00:24 +0000http://libraries.mit.edu/news/?p=22307Join the Program on Information Science for a brown bag talk, Can Computers be Feminist? Procedural Politics and Computational Creativity. Discussant Gillian Smith will examine how computers are increasingly taking on the role of a creator — making content for games, participating on Twitter, and generating paintings and sculptures. These computationally creative systems embody formal models of both the product they are creating and the process they follow. Like that of their human counterparts, the work of algorithmic artists is open to criticism and interpretation, but such analysis requires a framework for discussing the politics embedded in procedural systems. In this talk, we will examine the politics that are (typically implicitly) represented in computational models for creativity, and discuss the possibility for incorporating feminist perspectives into their underlying algorithmic design.

Gillian Smith is an Assistant Professor in Art+Design and Computer Science at Northeastern University, where she performs research and teaches in the game design program. Her research interests are in computational creativity, computational craft, and gender in games and technology.

Information Science Brown Bag talks, hosted by the Program on Information Science, consists of regular discussions and brainstorming sessions on all aspects of information science and uses of information science and technology to assess and solve institutional, social and research problems. These are informal talks. Discussions are often inspired by real-world problems being faced by the lead discussant.

]]>OA research in the news: A cheap, fast test for the Zika virushttp://libraries.mit.edu/news/?p=22211
Fri, 13 May 2016 17:07:07 +0000http://libraries.mit.edu/news/?p=22211

Image: Wyss Institute at Harvard University

Researchers at MIT and other universities have developed a cheap, fast test to diagnose the Zika virus, which is spread by infected mosquitoes and is particularly dangerous to pregnant women. The test involves sensors embedded in paper that can detect a particular genetic sequence found in Zika. If the sequence is present in a person’s blood, urine, or saliva, the paper changes color within hours.

“We have a system that could be widely distributed and used in the field with low cost and very few resources,” said lead researcher James Collins, the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering and Science in MIT’s Department of Biological Engineering and Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES), in a story by MIT News. Other MIT researchers involved include Lee Gehrke, the Hermann L.F. von Helmholtz Professor in IMES.

A Zika virus outbreak began in Brazil in 2015; most people have mild or few symptoms, so they may not realize they’ve been infected. But the virus can cause serious birth defects.

The new test could soon be used in the field. “More work and additional testing would be needed to ensure safety and efficacy before actual deployment,” said Collins. “We’re not far off.”

Since the MIT faculty established their Open Access Policy in March 2009 they have made thousands of research papers freely available to the world via DSpace@MIT. To highlight that research, we’re offering a series of posts that link news stories about scholars’ work to their open access papers in DSpace.

]]>TAIR brings Arabidopsis Thaliana data to youhttp://libraries.mit.edu/news/?p=22104
Mon, 02 May 2016 15:40:36 +0000http://libraries.mit.edu/news/?p=22104Many of you will already know the key plant Arabidopsis thaliana, the first plant to have its genome sequenced. But did you know MIT Libraries provides full access to TAIR, The Arabidopsis Information Resource? Use TAIR to search for genetic and molecular data in this popular plant model organism: it contains the complete genome sequence, gene structures, products, and expression, genome maps, markers, and even seed stocks!

Arabidopsis thaliana is so much more than just your typical mustard green or roadside weed. Its importance in various life sciences, medical, plant, environment and agricultural research is shown by the number of hits in some key databases. A search in CAB, a large applied life and agricultural sciences database, produces more than 45,000 results. PubMed, the definitive database for medical and biosciences research, produces more than 56,000 results for the plant.

Looking for a more robust way to keep track of your research data, collaborate within a research group, and share resources across group members and devices? Electronic Lab Notebooks, or ELNs, expand upon the premise of paper lab/field notebooks to help meet the evolving needs for managing research during its active phase.

Recognizing this demand in our own community, IS&T has acquired LabArchives, a cloud-based ELN system now freely available to MIT faculty, staff, students, and affiliates. MIT Libraries’ Data Management Services supports the use of LabArchives as part of an overall data management workflow.

Key features of LabArchives:

Ability to upload and store files – including text, tables, images, spreadsheets, and attachments – in their original format

Ability to create standard ELN formats and templates for your research group

]]>Why not Ask Us? It’s April!http://libraries.mit.edu/news/?p=21999
Thu, 21 Apr 2016 15:35:47 +0000http://libraries.mit.edu/news/?p=21999Let’s face it: the last half of the spring semester is here, papers are due, assignments need to be completed. The time seems right to highlight one of the best ways MIT Libraries supports teaching and research on campus.

With a simple click wherever you see an “Ask Us!” button, you’ll be sending a signal to librarians who pick up questions and get back in touch by 5pm the next business day. If a face-to-face discussion would help, research consultations are easy to set up. And if it’s something super quick, there’s a chat service from 10am to 6pm Monday through Friday. Lots of ways to get in touch!

Librarians are always ready to assist the MIT community with any information need. Every department, lab, and center has a liaison librarian who specializes in resources connected to the people and research that happens there. Helpful staff are located at each of the Libraries’ service desks to assist with access questions or to help get you started. And don’t forget our great study spaces.

As the spring winds down, please be in touch. Ask Us! in April, and the rest of the year besides!